


bumps in the night, crossing a line

by notorious



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: F/F, a total eclipse of rationality, nicole comes to her rescue, or they might just be on drugs, questionable morality, questionable police activity, they might be in love, this is maybe canon-adjacent at best, wynonna commits a crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:41:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25285537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notorious/pseuds/notorious
Summary: wynonna is not a fan of asking for help until it’s three-am and nicole is the only one she trusts with the situation at hand.
Relationships: Wynonna Earp/Nicole Haught
Comments: 4
Kudos: 53





	bumps in the night, crossing a line

**Author's Note:**

> howdy. re-worked this from an ooooold thing i did in early twenty-nineteen, but you don’t care about that. hopefully caught all of my grammatical (or other) mistakes.
> 
> established wynhaught? i think? sort of? they need each other, that’s all i know. (and nothing but love for my leading ladies but there is an h in wynhaught and i’ll die on that hill.) enjoy.

**_PURGATORY, WITCHING HOUR._ **

Ghost town’s lain dormant for hours now. 

It’s then that Nicole Haught gets the call. An oddly calm (and somehow still frantic) one because it’s just past three in the morning and the officer is still a rookie requiring a solid eight hours a night. Without that she needs four cups of coffee and a Ritalin bump.

Isn’t until the phone rings a third time that Nicole manages to answer it. Takes a second to scramble for the phone, another to slide her thumb across the screen, and one more to lay the thing to her ear and mumble a groggy “hello?”

“Nicole?”

“Wynonna?”

“I need your help.”

That’s a first. New territory for  _ you _ , officer.

“What time is it?”

“Late.” Pause. “I need your help.”

Wynonna Earp does not ask for help. She’d fight the gods  _ and _ the demons singlehandedly if it meant keeping those she cares for out of the crossfire. This is a step down from her very rigid comfort zone, Nicole knows, and it’s exactly that which makes her see the significance of this request. You’d better believe she’s going to hop to it. However late it is doesn’t matter, not any longer.

Wynonna needs help and so Wynonna becomes Nicole’s first and only priority.

She’s rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she asks, “What happened?” and it’s Wynonna’s answer that drains any lasting tiredness from her.

“Not over the phone.”

Red flag.

Big blaring neon red and yellow caution sign.

Nicole’s glad Wynonna didn’t give up after the first unanswered dial.

Fuck caution, she thinks.

She slides out of bed and into yesterday’s jeans. Scuffed up black boots follow.

“Where are you?”

She pulls on a police academy hoodie and has no idea the irony of it as she tops it with her windbreaker. She’s halfway out the door already.

“First place I took you whiskey shooting.”

“Stay put. I’m out the door.”

The rookie officer is rushing. Nearly sprinting to her car at the curb, the old one, the decommissioned Crown Vic. Police auction vehicle.

Purgatory sleeps while Nicole Haught soars forty over the limit. She can’t think of anything other than Wynonna’s safety. If she couldn’t give anything up over the phone—then, what?

What on God’s green earth is she driving into?

The first place Wynonna got her drunk and dragged her out to shoot cans.

Out at the old bread factory.

A thirty minute drive from Nicole’s place that she’s about to make in thirteen. All while her head whirls around an eye of worry. She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into, never does with Wynonna. Especially now. Between the short and uninformative phone call and Nicole’s inkling to assume the worst there isn’t much to do other than worry. Which she’s more than used to, mind you; half her time on the force has been spent wrangling negativity. Lowlifes. Criminals.

But this is Wynonna, who may be both of those things depending on the day, but that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters to Nicole is that someone she cares about has something on the line.

Whatever she wouldn’t tell her over the phone will pale in comparison to what Nicole’s seen on the beat. So she thinks.

Cut back to the first time Nicole Haught encountered a lifeless body on duty. Some street urchin, bathed in mud, caked in purple bruises dark enough to hide his natural features, tossed in a dumpster. Half-burned.

Sergeant at the time, some straight-from-a-frat dickhole with unsettlingly idealistic attributes warned her: “Try not to blow chunks, sweetheart. Shows weakness. Ain’t cute, either.”

The nerve.

Nicole barely blinked.

Wasn’t her first time with a body.

Granted, the first time had not been in uniform. Hadn’t been reported to the police, either, just cleaned up in the back alley of that hellish restaurant she spent four years of her life amounting to nothing at.

Chalk that one up to drunken warfare. Took one look at the blood and the exposed bone and told her boss to leave her the fuck out of it. And so he did.

So the charred up dumpster body was number two. No chunks blown, not a beat missed. Sergeant didn’t know what to make of her, how to gauge the tranquility with which she surveyed the scene. She was cold that day, closed off to his condescension, shielded from the gruesome realities of street brutality. Guarded from everything, open only to the job she was there to do. What she had to do.

And now she’s got another job to do. Wynonna to tend to.

At the old bread factory.

Nicole pulls up alongside the blue and white truck and abandons ship. It’s a dead zone. Truly. Cold air, cool hearts, a girl with hair like a mare with a Hollywood stylist pacing the side of the road obsessively like she’s just been told it’s where she’ll die. 

Wynonna.

And then there’s a man, all black and blue. Slumped over on the road’s shoulder, a crimson-coated axe glistening by his split-open skull.

And then there’s silence. A bleak nothingness that ends in a quiet neither woman is ready to break. They’re lucky it’s a dead night (hah), lucky no lurkers linger along the road of no return. Where the country route hits the first town road at a tee.

They don’t talk until Nicole makes Wynonna stop pacing. Two hands on her shoulders, stern eyes like a scolding parent. It’s time to address the elephant in the room, Nicole decides. Poor sap.

Nicole, insistently: “What happened?”

It’s all she can do to form a coherent thought because there is a dead man in their midst and Nicole does not know who he is and no one to answer questions but Wynonna Earp who has apparently gone mute since hanging up the phone.

“Wynonna. Listen to me.” Nicole squeezes the girl’s shoulders. “I need you to talk to me. I need you to tell me what happened.”

Nothing.

Only questions she doesn’t want to ask.

Did you kill him?

If not — who?

But if you did…

“I need you to focus. Focus on me.”

And Wynonna does, or tries to. But it’s hard for her, she’s caught up in perils, stuck in misery, lost to a void somewhere between shock and exultation. Nicole shakes her. (“C’mon, Earp, don’t do this now.”) Shakes her again. (“Oh, Christ.”)

One more time. 

Exasperated: “I can’t do shit for you if you don’t tell me what happened.”

Wynonna lifts her chin, tosses the hair from her eyes.

Her pupils are blown.

And from the darkest pit of hell comes a smile. A slow sultry smile that stretches the length of her aura and sinks its claws into the officer’s empathy.

Nicole knows that look. The apathy makes sense.

“You’re high.”

“And in possession with intent to distribute.” Now she wants to talk. Wynonna’s hands slink around Nicole’s middle beneath her windbreaker and pull at the hoodie. “You gonna take me in, officer?”

“Stand down, Wynonna.” A beat. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

It’s dreadfully simple.

Even without bleach, running water, or a clear objective. Wynonna wants to leave the body, wants someone to find him. Nicole wants to wipe any trace of the corpse from Purgatory, tag it a missing persons case when the time comes, and call it a day.

But Earps have a thing with getting their way.

Step one: drag the John Doe into the shadows behind the factory.

Two: strip him down to his boxers, try not to think about Calvin Klein holding open casting calls for corpses.

Three: rip open the damned gift meant for Nedley’s upcoming thirtieth year on the force, a 1974 Single Grain imported from London, the only liquid in either of your vehicles; wipe down the John with the booze and the towel from your gym duffel (“This is two-hundred and eighty dollars of whisky you’re wasting on a dead man, I hope you know,” Wynonna says, and yeah, you know.), prop him up against the corner of the building.

Four: ditch his clothes in the trunk of the Crown Vic for future incineration. Ditch the towel, too, while you’re at it.

Five: make a feeble attempt to keep Wynonna from slotting the axe back into homeboy’s oozing open wound (“Oh my god — give me that… At least wipe it down first.”), go back for the towel, wipe the fricking thing with even more scotch, polish off the bottle in three large gulps, slide the axe back home yourself.

Six: stand back. Catch your breath. Try not to humor Wynonna when she slinks over and noses into your neck and mumbles something about coming to her rescue while her hands sneak under all your layers and paw at the muscles in your back. Try and fail. She’s warm and you’re soft and you’ve always been a sucker for an Earp.

Necking in front of a dead guy is all fun and games until tires screech somewhere westward and Nicole takes Wynonna all rough by the chin and forces her gaze.

“Tell me you’re good to drive.” Not a request. No inconspicuous way to get both cars off the scene on her own.

Wynonna wrenches her chin from the officer’s grasp, nods, presses her lips to Nicole’s thumb where she tastes faintly of blood and booze.

Softly, with another nod: “Always good to drive.”

“Good.”

They walk shoulder-to-shoulder back to the cars, all awash in crisp winds that whistled while they worked and now as they walk just seem to hiss.

The problem isn’t that a man’s murder will go unsolved, no, that doesn’t bother Nicole as much as it should. The problem is that none of this bothers her much at all. Other problem is that she hasn’t acknowledged  _ that _ as a problem just yet. It’s simply a thing that happened and cannot be undone lest Nicole or Wynonna end up in prison. Or worse.

A murder gotten away with. Nicole will make damn sure of it.

Nicole puts herself between Wynonna and the truck, hesitates a moment.

“Come crash at my place.”

“Why, officer, I thought you’d never ask.”

That’s that.

And she mostly trusts Wynonna to drive right now because the Earp got herself out to the factory in one piece without a single dent or ding or scratch in the truck to prove it.

She trusts Wynonna, even after this, because it feels an awful lot like nothing has changed.

Feels an awful lot like they just went bowling. Or stayed out until last call. Or stayed up just to watch the sunrise, which they will end up doing, but only through the window beside the bed in the digs Nicole Haught calls home.

Wynonna and Nicole fit together in this moment like the final two pieces of a puzzle you’ve been working on for weeks. They operate on a call-and-response foundation. One needs, the other provides, always going both ways. You might say they need one another.

But Wynonna’s never asked for help for anything close to this. Or anything more than “yo, dummy, help me move this couch.” So it’s still new.

It isn’t until they’re home, John Doe’s clothes bagged and ready to burn, a few tequilas tossed back, that Nicole comes upon what should be the gravity of her willing participation in such transgression. There should be remorse, self-accusation, something. 

There’s fact: she wiped a body and a murder weapon clean, she’s going to burn the dead man’s clothes, she’s going to keep the ‘ops off Wynonna Earp’s tail more than she’s ever done before, and she’s settling into bed with a murderess.

And then there’s nothing.

Nicole feels nothing.

No.

That’s not entirely true.

She feels good around Wynonna, she’s over the initial silent treatment on scene, and she’s a little buzzed, a little warm in the cheeks, and on her way to full on hot.

They sit facing each other, criss-cross, knees touching, but their roles have reversed. At first the protector, the white knight riding in to Wynonna’s rescue, Nicole’s regressed to a state of dependency because her brain has filtered out all negative connotations and left her with only the sweet sentiment of companionship. She’s gone soft. Wynonna, initially awestruck and dumbfounded at her own capability, has progressed to her well-known role of caretaker.

It’s Wynonna’s call now, her territory, her jurisdiction. Safe in the confines of her officer’s home she can take the reins with every bit of confidence an Earp can muster. It’s easy here.

Nicole laughs when Wynonna fishes that damned cross pendant from her pocket.

Kathryn Merteuil, eat your heart out.

Such functional practicality, that necklace. No coke in this case, Wynonna doesn’t like uppers, is instead partial to the powdered grasp of opiates. Special O, sweet dust.

Wynonna unscrews the tee of the cross, spoons a helping, and coaxes Nicole in with a leading little smile, and, “C’mere, dummy. Bump up.”

Too easy. Too weak, maybe.

Nicole scoots closer, hunches over the teeny-weeny spoon, lets Wynonna screw one of her nostrils shut with a thumb, and inhales a tidal wave.

Sugary bliss. A thousand tiny orgasms in every nerve in her body, magnified to the nth degree.

The officer topples, back to mattress, head to pillows, stretches out with a whine, and tries to curl up but makes it only halfway.

She hears Wynonna rail her own dose once, twice, and then she’s there. Right there with Nicole.

For Wynonna, providing right now, after the fact, means playing big spoon to Nicole’s little. Wynonna curls around her with practiced ease, slips an arm around her middle, fingers grasping a handful of Nicole’s shirt.

It’s then that they’re good to talk, good to share. It isn’t until Nicole’s close to dozing and Wynonna’s tucking her chin over the officer’s shoulder, intent on a deep sleep, that words come.

“He was my parole officer, you know.”

Nicole doesn’t know. Or knows a little, bits and pieces, but hadn’t known the man’s face. She knows Wynonna had a shitty PO once upon a time, but never imagined this is how she’d meet him.

Nicole hums. “So murder was the next logical step,” she says, somewhere between understanding and oblivion.

And Wynonna: “Go big or go home.” Pause. “Dude used to make us peddle his drugs for him. Two kids died under his watch.”

“Oh.”

“So yeah,” Wynonna says. “Murder was the next logical step.”

“Right.”

“You good with that?”

Nicole doesn’t care, not about the murder. It’s over, it’s done with, he’s dead, she cleaned it up, and she’s not due at work for another day and a half.

So.

“S’all good, Earp. Did what you had to do.”

And then she’s asleep.

_ So. _

That’s that.


End file.
